Despite ongoing efforts to digitize education and move to online resources, nearly half of those living in rural communities in the US still lack broadband access. In remote tribal lands, the problem is even more acute with nearly two-thirds lacking access to adequate Internet. Over the last few years, we’ve worked with several tribes to find a scalable solution to this problem. Our approach is to provide connectivity for educational purposes first. This allows us to use the Educational Broadcasting System (EBS) spectrum, and the existing educational fiber infrastructure, which has undergone significant build-out and improvement over the last decade. For access, we run low cost base stations with an SDN LTE stack. Our goal is that, by coupling low cost gear with training local operators to participate in installation and maintenance, we are able to construct and operate remote cell networks for a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches.

Martin Casado

General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz

Martin Casado is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He was previously the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Nicira, which was acquired by VMware in 2012. While at VMware, Martin served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Networking and Security Business Unit. Martin started his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he worked on large-scale simulations for the Department of Defense before moving over to work with the intelligence community on networking and cybersecurity. These experiences inspired his work at Stanford where he created the software-defined networking (SDN) movement, leading to a new paradigm of network virtualization. While at Stanford he also co-founded Illuminics Systems, an IP analytics company, which was acquired by Quova Inc. in 2006. For his work, Martin was awarded both the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award and the NEC C&C award, and he’s an inductee of the Lawrence Livermore Lab’s Entrepreneur’s Hall of Fame. He holds both a PhD and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.